Reader question:
“How deeply do you like to bond with your spanking partners? When interacting do you prefer to stick to just light hearted-even superficial interaction? Do you like to share most or all of your personality traits, non-spanking experiences? Do you trust your scene friends as much as you do your non-scene ones?
I’ve noticed people online worrying aloud about where someone has been and proclaiming online fetish friends to be more important than even relatives, but then they disappear for months on end themselves without a word. So how close are you really then to your spanking friends?”
I’m going to address the second part of the topic first. I don’t think the sometimes fickle nature of online communities is limited to the fetish world as I’ve seen the same behavior a lot on health support boards. People connect on a unique level over their common interest, one that friends and family don’t understand on a first hand basis, and get obsessed for a while over having found this magical cyberland of like beings. And just like the fetish world, the boards come with friendships and meets and possible romance and dramas and hurt feelings and name calling and trolls and sock puppets and disappearing acts. It’s interesting to watch the behavior from a sociological standpoint.
I wonder if it’s the very nature of it being a cyber world. You expect your dreamland of friends to be available whenever you turn on the computer much like a TV and only require attention when you feel like it. I think it’s a general theme in today’s tech driven world. You have more ways of connecting without having to make any actual contact and little effort. You don’t have to coordinate to speak with someone, you can text and avoid a conversation and don’t even have to correspond at the same time. You don’t have to visit friends or go to reunions because you have Facebook to check up on their lives and what they look like at your leisure. Heck, you don’t even have to say anything, you just have to click like on a comment or a photo and you can put yourself in the close friends category.
I’m not dissing this state of tech at all because I’m guilty as sin of FB stalking photos and have no intent of ever attending a reunion, but I do think this mentality contributes to people’s behavior as noted at least as much as the fact that they are scene friends.
Ok, now to back up to the first few questions. Personally, my bond with spanking partners can vary as much as regular friendships. It can range anywhere from very close along the lines of best friends to more casual acquaintances. It can sound odd to think of playing with someone as being equivalent to acquaintances considering the intimate nature of the act, but that’s how I’d categorize friendly play at a party between two people that have only just met and chatted for a few minutes before engaging in a spanking scene.
For me, it’s a wonderful thing when I can connect to a person on many levels beyond just spanking. It rounds out the friendship and strengthens the bond. I like having common interests to discuss or even getting together to enjoy a vanilla activity. But I have to have a sense of trust in a person, whether vanilla or spanko, to truly share both sides of myself fully so I am cautious. I can completely understand wanting to keep the worlds neatly divided as it takes a while for me to build that level of trust. Some friends that I’ve made through the spanking world have become just as close and trustworthy to me as non-scene friends. But since I connect to them with common interests outside of spanking, I don’t differentiate them as scene friends. They are simply good friends!
How about you? How close a connection do you foster with your spanking friends?